Dear friends!
It’s time for another progress report.
I don’t have any new teasers today, because I haven’t been creating new images or animations – I’ve been busy with other things these weeks.
Beauty and the Thug in GOG’s Dreamlist
A huge thank-you to Peach Enthusiast – thanks to his efforts, Beauty and the Thug is now listed in GOG’s Dreamlist.
I have one big request: please vote for my game – it’s very important to me and won’t take much time.
The link is here.
Implementing Amy’s Rules
I’ve talked about Amy’s rules before, so I won’t repeat the details today. To implement them in the game, I had to create a large number of variations for existing renders. For example, cases where Amy isn’t allowed to wear any clothes at home, or walk around with a butt plug in her butt.
Hundreds of renders were added, and as of today, this part of the work is fully completed.
Implementing the Rules in Animations
Here’s what I didn’t account for right away: how to apply these rules to animations.
The problem is that they massively inflate the game’s size. For example, let’s say one long animation takes 8 MB. To support just two options – pubes (shaved/unshaved) and armpits (shaved/unshaved) – you need 4 versions (shaved+shaved, shaved+unshaved, unshaved+shaved, unshaved+unshaved), which totals 32 MB. Already unpleasant, but manageable.
But if you add just two more parameters, the total size of all possible variations becomes 128 MB for that single animation. And if you have dozens of such animations, it becomes a serious issue.
The most obvious solution was to dump it all on Aqwaa and see what happens – unfortunately, that didn’t work out. I had to think through a solution myself. To be fair, I had the general idea from the beginning, but the implementation turned out to be less straightforward than expected. Still, in the end I developed a workflow and wrote a script that automates most of the process.
In short: I add a transparency mask to animations, which allows one animation to be overlaid on top of another and played in sync, and I crop the video down to the smallest possible rectangle to reduce file size. On top of that, I slightly increased the compression of the video files.
In my test, an 18-second animation took 4.32 MB. To support all options the “traditional” way, I would have needed 16 animations, totaling about 70 MB. With my method, I managed to get away with just 5 animations instead of 16 – and the final total size was 18 MB. In my opinion, that’s a pretty good result.
After that, I recorded a 45-minute video tutorial for Aqwaa explaining all the steps.
But here’s the catch: Aqwaa has a new 50xx-series graphics card, and it turned out that with it, some steps of my workflow wouldn’t work for some reason. He spent hours trying to find workarounds, but no luck.
Today he finally got hold of an older computer with a 30xx-series GPU – and everything worked there. Right now he has already started processing the animations, and we’re already seeing the first successes. There’s reason to believe that within a few days all animations will be ready. Fingers crossed.
Coding
In the middle of all this animation drama, I started working on the game’s code. Well — “started” isn’t quite accurate: a significant chunk of the code is already finished.
I defined all images and all animations (except the ones that aren’t ready yet), and I wrote code for all the new events except Bed Play with Amy and Check on Amy. Along the way I had to render more than 20 missing images and insert them where they belong.
Where Things Stand Now
So as of today: Aqwaa is working on the animations, and I’m working on the game’s code.
I still need to implement code for two events, then add the promised stat-cards (at least for Lisa and Amy), and fix that pile of bugs that you, my friends, have discovered.
After that: testing, translation, and finally release.
There’s only a little left – and I’m doing everything I can to publish the game as quickly as possible.
That’s all for now, friends. Back to work on the game. Wishing you all the best – and stay tuned for good news (at least from me).
Your zegamez